Yoda was right when he said blind video rentals lead to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leaders to suffering. Couldn’t say it any better, my green man. They Crawl Below was a blind rental, just enough hint at hopefully a Tremors-like creature feature to be fun. It wasn’t.

The flick is about a guy who gets pinned by a car in a small garage when an earthquake hits. He has to figure out how to get out from under the car, contact help, and, oh yeah, survive the attack of the giant nematodes!! Sometimes that last part is an afterthought. Somehow.

This is a pretty low budget film that tries to make the best of its single location… the tiny garage. It doesn’t really work. It gives it the old college try by pretending to be 127 Hours and giving us character development and flashbacks but it’s just too poorly written to care. Really corny and laughable dialog, uninteresting escape planning, boring relationship drama, and not even a single arm chopped off in the attempt.

And, yeah, sometimes giant nematodes (worms) pop out of a crack in the floor and try to bite him. They are often practical effects, sometimes CGI, and never particularly thrilling. I mean, they can be a little gross and if you have, I dunno, wormaphobia, they might skeeve you out. But they don’t show up enough for a creature feature… but that’s partly because this movie would rather be 127 Hours than Tremors (with tiny little graboids).

I wish I could credit the movie for its attempts at character development or doing something different with a creature feature. But it’s really just too poorly made to earn that pass. Not fun enough nor dramatically interesting enough.

Score: 58